The present invention relates to systems, methods, and computer program products for managing power consumption in computing systems.
A growing emphasis has been placed on power efficiency in data processing equipment. Improvements are needed in the power efficiency of server computing systems under varying load conditions. Unlike desktops or laptops, server systems may have extended periods of very high utilization, and may experience sudden surges or spikes in demand. Servers may be sized for daytime, end of month, end of quarter or end of year processing, leaving significant durations where the overall usage activity of the system is far below the peak capacity. These temporal variations in workload demand provide an opportunity to reduce energy demand.
Many operational environments exhibit rapidly changing demand such as spikes due to external events, or due to the normal business workflow. If spare capacity is configured to support these surges, as often is the case, then the power can be reduced if the system can transition sufficiently fast when a surge occurs. Conventional approaches to lowering power of the whole system in underutilized servers may impact user response time of database processing systems and therefore result in missing service level agreements (SLAs), or may be slow to react to increases in demand leading to unacceptable degradation in user response time.